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Update: Effective March, 2014, you must be a fully registered member of The LightZone Project in order to download the program. See the message above about registration. Once the registration process is fully completed and you have logged in after approval, you will see the download links for Linux, Windows, and Mac in the left sidebar. Approval is now automatic. Refresh your browser if you do not see the links. Contact us if you have further problems, but please follow the instructions in "contact". The program remains free of charge. We are requiring membership for security purposes, to better track the downloads, and to help build the community in order to attract developers and improve the knowledge base. It is fine if you do not wish to participate in the forums---no one is forcing you to---- but we would like you to participate and believe that in the long run a larger member base will be better for the project, especially in terms of attracting development support. We do not think it is too much to ask that you register in exchange for free and quite interesting software. We hope that you like it as much as we do, and will share with the community your experiences, questions, and comments.

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Updated, March 5 2014: Once you register and receive your automated email (read texts and link underneath photo banner at the top of the page), the Download Block will magically appear immediately below this block. Please therefore read all instructions about registering. Approval is now automatic.

RAW Profiling Center

Our consolidated area for all things RAW for LightZone: current and latest RAW profiles, dcraw updating, and instructions for creating RAW profiles for LightZone Updated: June 20, 2013RAW Profiles and D.I.Y. Profiling

Thoughts for Linux beta testers

Posting rules: It shouldn't need saying, but... play nice. Please keep your discussions civil. You can disagree, just don't be disagreeable. And, of course, all of the usual stuff like no spamming. Tex adds: I'll be rigorously enforcing this as we go along. We're probably going to be a small community in a little lifeboat, so we can't have members at each others' throats. This is for the sake of the project as a whole. So when you post, pretend you're speaking in person with your very wealthy auntie who has always treated you wonderfully and currently lists you prominently in her will. I won't be tossing anyone out of the forums because we are all in this together (except spammers: immediate membership cancelation), but I'll delete suspect posts right away.

I'm not actually an experienced Beta Tester, but I'll throw out some thoughts for those of you doing this

1. You'll need to be able to document for us exactly what you are running: All Linux details about versions, & etc, and your machine's specs. You'll need to be a bit conscious of what programs you've got running in the background, if any.
2. What is your camera? If your are working with raws , make sure they are supported!
3. Do stuff you would normally do. If you have a light PP touch, that's fine. If you stomp on your photos, that's fine too. Pay attention to how long things take.
4. We are of course interested in all the aspects of the program, so those of you who do a lot of batch processing, please do that and note if there is a point at which LZ starts to bog down. Time your batch. If you do a lot of B+W conversions, do those. If you have your own templates, see if you can reproduce them, better yet import them, and apply them.
5. Please check the 1:1 view, and whether that bogs down, and under what circumstances.
6. My experience is that LZ began to get slow-ish when around a dozen tools were in play. That's been less true for me with more RAM.
7. If any of you are processing scans of film, especially large scans (MF or LF), see how LZ behaves. My experience is that things got dodgy once you passed the 160mb threshold.
8. Of course please note any changes from your previous version(s) of LZ. I believe there was some missing functionality in Lightcrafts versions for Linux. If you suddenly can't/can do something you used to be able to do/couldn't do, note that and how.
9. Obviously document your problems. Try to reproduce them. There is a log file which ought to be found in My Documents\LightZone. Look for it and save it for forwarding to the Dev Team, especially in crashes.
10. Please try printing if you are set up for that, bordered and borderless.

I've tried the 64-bit and 32-bit rpms, and it seems to be looking for com.lightcrafts.platform.linux.LinuxLauncher which is not in /usr/share/lightzone (32-bit version) or /opt/lightzone (64-bit version)...

Tried installing on Ubuntu 10.04 - it is dependent on java 7.0 which is not available in repository

Successfully installed on Ubuntu 12.04 - it choked as described by sgx2:

Starting LightZone version 3.9.1 ...
with options :
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: com/lightcrafts/platform/linux/LinuxLauncher : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:634)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:277)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:73)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:212)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:205)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:321)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:294)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:266)
Could not find the main class: com.lightcrafts.platform.linux.LinuxLauncher. Program will exit.

I thought I'd give LightZone for Linux a quick try on my production machine running Kubuntu 12.10 LTS. The same issue here:

Starting LightZone version 3.9.1 ...
with options :
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: com/lightcrafts/platform/linux/LinuxLauncher : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:634)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:142)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:277)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:73)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:212)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:205)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:321)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:294)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:266)
Could not find the main class: com.lightcrafts.platform.linux.LinuxLauncher. Program will exit.

Hello,
tried to install on "Debian unstable" and got the same errors like "Usual User". Could fix it easily, but got now a problem with the used GLIBC_version.
Debian uses GLIBC_2.13 in moment and Lightzone is compiled and depends on GLIBC_2.14.So I can't see any Nef's , jpeg's or tif's in moment
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /opt/lightzone/libJAI.so: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by /opt/lightzone/libJAI.so)
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary1(ClassLoader.java:1935)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1860)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1850)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:845)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1084)
at com.lightcrafts.app.Application.verifyLibraries(Application.java:1707)
at com.lightcrafts.app.Application.main(Application.java:2163)
at com.lightcrafts.platform.linux.LinuxLauncher.main(LinuxLauncher.java:48)
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /opt/lightzone/libLCJPEG.so: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by /opt/lightzone/libLCJPEG.so)
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary1(ClassLoader.java:1935)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1860)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1850)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:845)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1084)
at com.lightcrafts.app.Application.verifyLibraries(Application.java:1707)
at com.lightcrafts.app.Application.main(Application.java:2163)
at com.lightcrafts.platform.linux.LinuxLauncher.main(LinuxLauncher.java:48)
java.lang.UnsatisfiedLinkError: /opt/lightzone/libLCTIFF.so: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.14' not found (required by /opt/lightzone/libLCTIFF.so)
at java.lang.ClassLoader$NativeLibrary.load(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary1(ClassLoader.java:1935)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary0(ClassLoader.java:1860)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadLibrary(ClassLoader.java:1850)
at java.lang.Runtime.loadLibrary0(Runtime.java:845)
at java.lang.System.loadLibrary(System.java:1084)
at com.lightcrafts.app.Application.verifyLibraries(Application.java:1707)
at com.lightcrafts.app.Application.main(Application.java:2163)
at com.lightcrafts.platform.linux.LinuxLauncher.main(LinuxLauncher.java:48)

I also had the Java version problem ("Unsupported major.minor version 51.0") that I could fix myself with the update-alternatives command. The openjdk-7-jre was pulled in automatically as a dependency when I installed LightZone with gdebi. After fixing Java I came upon exactly the same problem as Hansemann described. Only difference is that my OS is Debian 7 (since two days, it is the new stable release of Debian). This is the amd64 edition.

Perhaps I am being simplistic, but it seems to me the problem could perhaps be avoided by building the LightZone .debs against a conservative environment such as Debian 7. Am I correct in thinking that they could then be used in every Debian-based distribution that is more up-to-date?

No problems so far on another machine I tried which has Xubuntu 12.10 amd64. Unfortunately this is also one of my oldest and slowest computers, not suitable for anything more than very superficial testing. I.e. does it start, can it load a PEF or DNG picture? Of course so far, the answer is yes.

while I expect, that my problem with the GLIBC would disappear in a few days by itself, cause after the new "Debian stable" is released, there would be very much updates coming to the unstable tree in the next days.But the problems for the users of a stable debian system will stay for a long time....
if there are problems with building on debian, I could try to help.
regards and thank you for all the good work!
UPDATE: The expected changes in Debian unstable happend :) and Lightzone is now working for me.It looks promising and seems to work very well...better in some aspects then my old instalation ever did.
Changing to 1:1 view is very fast now and some problems my old lightzone shows in the last year are gone.....fantastic !!!

Perhaps not everyone realises this, but when testing software on a Linux system it is almost always better to start it from a terminal. That way, one can catch the errors and other messages that are usually emitted by the programme during use.

This is one of the reasons that Linux isn't gaining market share: Devs expect everyone to be "advanced users". In an Alpha test, I expect the command line to be used frequently. In a Beta test, that should not be required unless there is a significant problem. It should certainly not be standard procedure to launch from the CL.

The phrase "open a terminal" pretty much guarantees that you've alienated 99.44% of the general market. It's acceptable--even expected--in an Alpha test. But a Beta test is about working out the kinks, not digging into the CL to figure out how to execute basic functions.

Are you saying one has to be an "advanced user" in order to type a simple command? That is a sad state of affairs if it is true. One would hope that most computer users pick up a few skills on the way.

menu and starticon are considered as "bells and whistles" to me. They will come, but they have not priority for the beta phase.

I'm sorry to be blunt, but... "how do I make the program start" is not "bells and whistles". In an Alpha release, sure. In a Beta? No. Absolutely not.

You've fallen into the most common trap for coders: "It's all about the code". As someone who's spent 30+ years working in customer service (in one form or another), I can tell you, with absolute confidence, that "make it easy to start the program" is the #2 priority (after "make sure it doesn't crash in the middle of something important). And.. even that is debatable.

You are marketing a product. If it is not blatantly obvious how to use that product, you will fail. I don't care how great your product is; if it's not easy to use, it will fail.

Look at Linux: It's more powerful, it's more configurable, it's more secure, and it's FREE. Why hasn't it taken over the world? Because the first words out of the mouths of geeks is "open the command line..."

Would you open a coffee shop in the basement of an abandoned building Dane, Wisconsin and tell everyone "I expect you to just find me"?

When you buy a media center from IKEA, and you're presented with a box full of unidentified parts, do you consider the assembly instructions to be "bells and whistles"?

If "make it work" doesn't have priority, you won't get any customers. Remember: This isn't about coding, this is about marketing.

I am interested in doing a Linux Beta trial. I am currently running two Gentoo boxes and a Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS on DUAL and Quad core AMD processors. I also do some programming and would be interested in the source code.

Thanks
PS
I am a forum member and my email is correct. But I am not receiving any email messages from the lightzone project.

Installed OK with help from the above 'hints' thanks! The main problems were getting JRE to the correct version and that Lightzone could locate it. Really great to get this on Puppy Linux as there's the potential to have Lightzone running in RAM from a bootable USB pendrive!!